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The 62,000 miles comes from the quoted article;

What made people stop laughing? Nanotech. Carbon nanotubes were developed in the 90s and promised to be the uber-strong, light, flexible supermaterial needed to build the kind of 62,000-mile cable that could transport humans into space. By the end of the 90s, NASA had released its report on the technological progress:

Because it doesn't give any specifics in TFA, or int the article linked in TFA. Are they soy-based? Yeast? Cloned-meat that exists in a semi-alive state? Some sort of toxic mix of petrochemicals? I have no idea.

The fact that the articles seem to go out of their way not to bring this sort of thing to our attention seems a bit telling. Just telling me that "they're eggs, but better!" does not encourage me to eat them. If anything, given how frequently corporations use deceit and distraction, this absence of fact just makes me want to avoid them all the more.

China is ascending the learning curve. Space provides a lot of tough problems. I wonder how many more visits NASA will be getting in the future, both official, and "unofficial"?

NASA's Strict Rules for Talking to and Working with China

wasn't there a story here a while back about his first warehouse being infested with rats and mould? I guess that's where some of the nutrients come from... quick google reveals this: http://motherboard.vice.com/bl...

Of course it has already been done (maybe NSFW)...
But yes, the living version....

The Motherboard experiment was just enough for me. http://motherboard.vice.com/en... If the product wasn't ready, don't have a reporter test it for a month, report rats, below hygiene standard preparation, and mold all over some package...

BTW this dude self-scanned $100 worth of groceries at Coles, got charged $62. He feels bad that he doesn't feel bad: http://www.vice.com/read/i-dont-feel-that-bad-about-stealing-from-coles-but-i-feel-bad-about-not-feeling-bad http://www.news.com.au/finance/money/shady-shoppers-stealing-millions-using-scanner-trciks/story-e6frfmd9-1226514344385

The point is that more telephone sanitizers and middle managers will be born here, and we need funds and fame to get them to keep getting on the B-ships. 24/7/355 isn't quite buzzword compliant. Also, tensions may run high -- blackouts are key times for mutiny. You know, sort of like on Skylab? On a different planet it could be far worse, "And the cameras are coming back online folks -- OMFG! WTF?! Managers are caught in the middle of a hostile take over! Audio is out: Not a single phone is sanitized. Oh the humanity! The bureaucrats' tape runs red! What could have caused this carnage?"

NASA and other Mars missions also could benefit from a relay, so maybe if it's only partially in the budget they can collaborate for an international relay station with other agencies like ESA, JAXA, NASA, etc. throwing in a few resources -- you know, like NASA's international partners did for Curiosity?

To seriously answer your question: They are STUDYING to figure out if there is any point. They're checking it out to see if it's feasible. Surely you don't have a problem with that; I mean you wouldn't just dismiss something as impossible because it's non-essential, eh? You're on Slashdot, no? Maybe as part of the payload to Mars drop a relay on the way, etc. The point of doing this research is to get a better handle on the situation.

We would like to know what study this is. Previous work shows the opposite.

http://www.bu.edu/news/2013/09/13/new-research-shows-link-between-rates-of-gun-ownership-and-homicides/

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/higher-rates-of-gun-ownership-dont-correlate-to-less-crime

Now there IS evidence that gun bans are ineffective, which is a different proposition.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/08/30/harvard-gun-study-no-decrease-in-violence-with-ban/

Some doctors are upset for not getting support after they helped torturing detained suspects.

In both cases, that maybe shows that very deep inside them, there is still a human being trying to confess the crimes that even they realize that are doing. "I was just following orders" don't cut the pain anymore.

You need to check your Google-Fu. Six months ago somebody did it. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/despite-skepticism-cody-wilson-successfully-3d-printed-entire-gun That's ignoring the developments since then.

http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/barrett-brown-is-bored-out-of-his-mind-in-jail So... the internet WAS just a fad?

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-to-build-a-secret-facebook

Perhaps the physical effects are not deadly, but consider the economic ones. Heroin isn't cheap and it's addictive. What are users going to do when they run out of money? Krokodil exists because it's cheap enough that once you're hooked, you'll take what you can get. Also factor in that many of the users often don't have a stable source of income and you can see that they'll resort to drastic means to obtain it, including those which involve a gun.

I'm all for safe use of harmless drugs like marijuana if they can be controlled, but after watching this video (credit due to someone else's post in the comments), I think the economic impact of legitimizing the use of an addicting drug like heroin would be severe, if not fatal.

Heroin overdose among experienced users with steady supplies are unheard of. Heroin is quite safe, actually.

The letal dose of heroin is 5x an "effective dose". I suppose some people who know what they're doing can avoid an overdose, but the gap between an effective dose and a lethal dose is a lot closer for heroin than for - well - every other illegal drug on this list: http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/200645104835_307.pdf

Now that you know all this, you and all other prohibitionists, especially those in Congress, are engaged in willful murder.

That's a pretty serious charge. I think you should reevalutate your definition of "willful murder". There's a real difference between showing up at someone's house and shooting them, versus making a drug illegal, causing a drug-user to seek out less-safe alternatives, resulting in them overdosing. The thing is that if you make a drug legal, it has complex effects on usage. One result might be an increase in drug use and then an increase in death rates (not only from drug overdose, but also indirect increases in crime as users mug/steal from people to get drug money or driving cars while under the influence). Further, there are other things involved in the decision to make a drug illegal than simply "reducing the number of deaths in society" - for example, if legalizing heroin resulted in fewer deaths, but a lot more people destroying their lives with heroin (but still living to a ripe old age), the second alternative might be worse. In the Vice videos about krokodile, they claim that something like 20% of the population of one city in Russia is addicted to heroin. I question those numbers, but one can see how a city with 20% heroin addiction rates might be a worse fate than having a 1% addiction rate + a dozen addicts dying each year.
http://www.vice.com/vice-news/siberia-krokodil-tears-part-1

I saw an independent Australian documentary on Krokodil in one of the southern Russian cities, like Novobirisk.

Was it this: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/vice-news/siberia-krokodil-tears-full-length ? (Narrator is British, btw).

You would like the right to resell your device for the highest price, right? Instead of caring about where tantalum comes from, try giving a shit that do-gooder environmentalists are making it illegal for you to sell your old cell phone to African geeks. You don't have to care about the resource curse, just selfishly act on behalf of your own interest, the Tinkerer Blessing. Repair, reuse and recycling is ultimately "conservative". You can hate me and still be on my side. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/e-waste-recycling-exports-are-good

Obama Comes Clean!

President Obama today announced he will no longer prevaricate (for the American audience: lie like Hell!) on the Syria matter, but instead offer them the "olive branch" of peace.

"If Syria and Iran will finally sign onto the WTO's Financial Services Agreement, thus allowing the banksters in, we will refrain from unleashing a leviathan deluge of cruise missiles against them," said an annoyed Barack Obama.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/05/making-the-world-safe-for-banksters/

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-09-07/high-level-us-intelligence-officers-syrian-government-didn%E2%80%99t-launch-chemical-

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-07/obamas-missing-link-no-direct-connection-between-assad-and-gas-attack

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/05/syria-battle-maaloula_n_3872906.html

No kidding. Liberia has bigger problem than college admissions.

I was specifically referring to (among others) the second result using your search terms. This is exactly why I stated that you need to cite your own research. You're hung up on my reaching a different conclusion than you did - because you didn't cite your sources...even after I had asked for them. This is exactly why I said what I did - please go back and read it, and then please cite your sources next time.

With regard to the (summary of the) single scientific article that I read - the Cornell article, the authors specifically stated that the data was not sound and that it was a commentary on policy rather than actual science.

I have no idea what you're basing your opinion on. I prefer science - it's all I have. I still have no clue where you're coming from, and I don't have any definitive answers - I'm not trying to bullshit you, my friend. However, you've only offered presumption and Google search terms. I would be happy to discuss this with you when we're on even ground. Unfortunately, we're still not speaking the same language.

So, killing a bunch of peaceful protesters -- Morsi supporters

There is nothing peaceful about them. Some of them are armed. Morsi and supporters have organized Rape Squads that surround women with 20-30 men at protests and penetrate them with knives and fingers. They put women and children on the edges of the encampment to make sure they would be the first ones injured or killed in the event of any action. Are you really in support of these monsters?

I guess your "Fuck you" also goes out to all the women raped, some killed from the bleeding (oddly it turns out it's not good to put knives inside vaginas), or to all the christians beaten to death and churches burned...

These idiots have lost any amount of sympathy I normally have for even the worst group of people. If they are allowed to continue millions will suffer. You are just one of the tools being misled by propaganda to support a rule of terror that was interrupted before full control could be attained.

Yup. Under the current administration, Canada is in some ways worse than the States with respect to domestic policy – it's just that the world is emphatically not watching, because – hey – it's Canada. Who cares?

Environmental charities are officially enemies of the state, budget watchdogs have to file freedom of information requests with their own money to get the information their mandates require, environmental protection and first nations rights have been gutted at the documented request of petroleum lobbies, it is now illegal to cover your face at a protest, activism of any kind is being branded as terrorism, and tens of millions of dollars are spent on blatant openly-reviled propaganda, while poverty is a growing problem.

Canada's a mess.

In a country where laws applies in the same way for everyone, that could pass. In US, in the other hand, that now see hacking as mass destruction weapons as they are used and plan to use them in big scale in that way, it will be labeled as terrorist and put you in jail for decades or more... unless you are a big contributor or work for them, in that case it will have no consequences.

Pushing it as "the new normal" dont make it justifiable, is like saying that is right that your operating system must have a blue screen every hour or widespread virus and you must keep buying it because sometimes other operating systems could have them rarely. Doing it, while putting civilians for decades or even centuries is just yelling that you don't care about what is fair or not, you just do what you want, you are the biggest bully in the neightbourhood after all.

So keep defending the big bully, with a bit of luck you won't be noticed by him for a bit more time that way. Just don't complain when comes your turn, and take into consideration that whatever comes, is your fault too.

Stalin and others were much, much worse. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge spring to mind.
But what disgusts me about America is the private prison industry - not a coincidence, IMO, that their staggering growth goes hand-in-hand with world record incarceration rates

Read Henri Wedell's reply to a question about profiting off of incarceration

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/whos-getting-rich-off-the-prison-industrial-complex

It is already too late. Your exploits/backdoors/identity thieving/vulnerability scans/url guessing and whatever got extremely punished (i.e. 100 years in jail, i think that almost no nazis in nuremberg got that high penalty), while US intelligence agencies do all of that, and far more, in the open and probably getting rewards for it, even with help from software manufacturers.

Face it, what you are calling democracy is just oligarchy with a wrong label over it. Don't let the word fool you.

You can get anything from 30 years to a century in jail for things that goes into the hacking umbrella, even for things that traditionally you won't call attacking. And if you are outside US, a drone could visit you.

This usually goes attackers or people that exploits or just bumps against a vulnerability in US government/institution sites, but even if you do against an "evil" organization (and that it is not just a nsa/fbi cover operation or whatever) it could eventually be used against you.

The true cost of Nuclear power is more than any other method.

Talk about easy mode! "Any other method" logically includes coal. And coal sucks. To put it in perspective, about twice as much electricity is produced each year from coal(44.9%) as from nuclear power(20.3%) in the USA.

What, you want healthcare costs included along with the fatalities? Okay, sure thing. How does $500B/year sound, for the USA ALONE?

I'd say I hate to break it to you, but that would be dishonest. I LOVE breaking this to you: The world could suffer a Chernobyl level event EVERY year and it would STILL come out cheaper than coal.

And while we are at it, lets add in all of the cost for nuclear power plant accidents both public and private funds and divide that by the the number of operating plants. Let's see, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, smaller costly but less publicized accidents.

Let's see: Chernobyl: $235B, TMI: $975M, Fukushima: too early to tell. Let's go with roughly between Chernobyl and TMI: $118B. It's probably quite high, but eh. Total: $354B, or about 3/5ths the damage coal does to the USA alone each year.

As I've said before, Chernobyl's design wouldn't have been allowed anywhere, the cost would have been far less if it had been built with a containment dome. 437 reactors, leaving the share per nuclear plant at $810M per your stupid standard.

Let's put it into better context: End of 2012 nuclear power had produced 69,760 billion kwh. Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima amount to .5 cents of cost per kwh. Yes, half a cent.

The quote in TFS was actually lifted from a separate article here. Someone just decided to change the link to the original BMJ article instead.

How about we put down the guns and 3D print a Peace Pipe.

Somehow - I find it hard to take any drug using nutcase seriously. Bath salts? Hmmm, yeah, alright.

"If there is one thing society can learn from the soap opera now engulfing tech zillionaire John McAfee, it is that rectal shelving is the best way to take the psychoactive drug MDPV, marketed and known colloquially as bath salts. “Measure your dose,” McAfee wrote on a psychonaut forum two years ago, under his Stuffmonger handle. “Apply a small amount of saliva to the middle finger, press it against the dose, insert. Doesn't really hurt as much as it sounds. We're in an arena (drugs/libido), that I navigate as well as anyone on the planet here. If you take my advice about this (may sound gross to some), you will be well rewarded.”"

http://www.vice.com/read/john-mcafee-bath-salts-belize-murder-fugitive-gregory-faull

Forgive me, but psychoactive suppositories?

Clumpy ugly gun? Seriously? Have you even worked with or seen the product of even a cheap version of these printers? This isn't your wife's glue gun cobbled onto some parts off of an old dot matrix printer and erector set driven by Etch-A-Sketch-ish software.

Ironic how that is the best layman's description of what a 3d printer is that I have heard. Might I add that printers have slightly higher temperature plastic and a thinner bead than your typical glue gun? "Clumpy ugly gun" was in reference to the actual gun in discussion here. It looks horrible.

I seriously like the story telling you do. You're very creative, write some fiction and become the next great scifi author. With writing skills like those you shouldn't waste time to post on the internet in response to Anonymous Cowards. Clearly you don't value your time highly enough, but you should because that live fire lawn gnome concept was brilliant. Please understand I mean this with the utmost sincerity.

From my post above "A plastic gun will fatigue after only a few shots". Yes, an armchair assassin would love this technology, however motivation and willingness to actually kill rarely corresponds with the level of education, creativity, and attention to detail needed to pull it off. We are talking some serious engineering here, there'd be load of software to write, circuits to program, and wiring to solder. In virtually any case not out of a James Bond story the assailant would just stab, or strangle their target in a fit of rage or shoot them with a real gun. Most murders are spur of the moment events, not methodically plotted actions thought out by a tormented genus in an underground lair. You might be watching too much television or reading too many spy novels.

Firing traditional pistol rounds in a completely plastic gun, the story we're talking about here, is a very bad idea that will destroy your printed gun in one or two shots. The gun will likely explode the first time it is fired due to the pressure and heat released by the gunpowder causing catastrophic failure before the bullet can leave the barrel. The explosive energy of modern bullets is too great to be used in anything but a steal chamber and barrel. Make a printed airsoft gun, sure. Printed dartguns, absolutely. Print a lower receiver, trigger, or grip, but when you start doing this you have already moved to my side of the argument. Printing the chamber and barrel with intention of firing traditional explosive propelled projectiles is a bonehead move that only a fool would trust to fire when called on. Even if the barrel doesn't explode on the first shot, the interior of the gun will warp and disfigure making the second shot an almost certain squib that, with luck, might only cost you a finger.

Criminals taking advantage of people that use an ATM is not brilliant or disturbing, or even new for that matter. ATM's are a relic of a by-gone era where most places didn't take VISA and payphones were on every corner and in this era you've far more to fear from your waitress than your ATM. If anything skimmer based criminals have made the world safer by robbing you digitally instead of physically taking you hostage at the ATM and forcing you to pay to live. If it turns out you got skimmed then notify your card issuer immediately and dispute the charges. All of that is beside the point however since this is about printing guns, not ATM faceplates. I don't think I said 3d printing is unuseful but rather that 3d printed versions of traditional cartridge firing guns are a bad idea.

Coilguns are real, right-now technology that is super easy to build out of easily obtainable parts. Your assessment of their power is amusing but the reality is that such weapons are far better suited for being printed than traditional firearms. Coilguns do not rely on high energy explosions to propel their projectiles, settling on high energy electromagnetic fields instead. Coil guns require electrical insulation to be safe to operate and using 3d printing techniques could make for a very elegant design that buries all the electrical contacts in safe insulating plastic.

While you were moving around, Vice.com got to spend time with you. If memory serves me, it was later revealed that the image they uploaded with you had GPS data that you then claimed to be spoofed. Coincidentally the news styled documentary they were going to do with you never seemed to surface ... now that things have died down can you give more context to that whole situation?

Obsolete by now, but still a good window into the weirdness of North Korea: http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3 (warning: autoplay video)

If you're from someplace that actually has diplomatic relations with them, it might be easier. Then there's this guy, who went with a friend via the Russian border (normally off-limits to Western tourists), spent 36 hours in North Korea without a guide, and somehow managed to stay out of jail: http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/ (long travelogue including journey across Russia)

I wrote about this last week on Motherboard, and included a video segment about the current detector situation from Vice's latest Iraq documentary: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/iraqs-most-popular-bomb-detection-device-is-useless-video Really just wish this were a metaphor for the war, but it's terribly real.

Vice has a report from Iraq titled In Saddam's shadow, where these devices are shown (and it is pointed out that they are a hoax). This kind of fraud is really one of the worst kinds...

From a country that 12 years ago was about 300 years back in time and had no interest in anything but water, was wanton to get to where it is now, which you'll see in the film is the change. It's been extraordinary. Just the change in life expectancy has gone up from about 46 to 64 in the last 10 years. The illiteracy rate, which is between 60 and 70 percent is falling rapidly.

3 years ago.

I'm a born US citizen inside the US. 3 years ago I had been blocked for 24 hours from all google owned sites, including youtube, for searching for the 'wrong' Chinese terms.

Like China and Russia, the United States has political prisoners. Barrett Brown is now serving a 100 year sentence for, you could say, being a political blogger. He didn't leak anything, just published and linked to material that others leaked; same as New York Times and google.

Soldiers/secret police are allowed to yank a citizen off the road to make them disappear. Potentially forever, thanks to the NDAA bill that Obama signed it law. Here's a video of precisely that happening during G20, dated 9/24/2009. The video depicts camouflaged men dragging someone (a protestor?) into an unmarked gray car. The car then drives off to the left. Justin Hallman, a student was recently investigated by the FBI for reposted the video as part of a school project. If the military G20 arrest was fake, why would the FBI bother to knock on the door of the person who reposted it?

When did we start to allow police forces in Western countries start to behave like militias?

How Cops Became Soldiers: An Interview with Police Militarization Expert Radley Balko. There ya go.

Just journalists documenting how weird North Korea is. Some of the articles are pretty hilarious:

http://www.vice.com/read/north-korea-fun-fair-mangyongdae-hoban-death

OK, here is a link about Anakata being moved from solitary confinement to regular prison.
Here is another one.

Congratulations, "as far as you know" is know slightly more correct.

For those who want to know more about that: http://www.vice.com/vice-news/the-mexican-mormon-war-part-1

What an epitaph .. link.

Reminds me of this : Piss Dungeon.

And before you ask, yes, Pakistan has a thriving music scene, heck, quite a significant amount of popular *indian* music is actually Pakistani singers hired to sing for Indian movies.

We have everything from soft Classical to hard metal and every other shade in that gradient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistani_music

One of the funniest moment was when the VICE guide visited Karachi, and as a contrast to the ever present violence, they decide to hit the local music scene...

http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-karachi-full-length

NASA could just upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to Youtube and save some money.

Great idea; I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Would this be the same as your lame arsed comment with a huge block of blank space to suck up as much as possible of the first page. I'm sure you would have produced more blank space in the Slashdot auto comment rejected would have allowed it.

Foxcon is largely viewed as Chinese because that's where it's factories are that pay wages in cents on the dollar compared to the western world. Sure it's multi-billionaire owner who sent the supervisors of Foxcon to a major Chinese zoo to learn how best to handle 'ANIMALS' and use those methods on the 'ANIMALS' at the factory http://www.businessinsider.com/foxconn-animals-2012-1.

"Chinaâ(TM)s largest electronics manufacturer, the already-loathed Foxconn" is a direct quote from the site, that site of course being http://www.vice.com/en_au. Most definitely a very edgy web site with some great videos but no matter, a direct quote is a direct quote. No if you want to complain naughty, naught, poo, poo because the submitter did not properly reference the quote, well fine.

Metafilter recently had a thread discussing an interview (alas, poorly written) with Rich Terrile, a NASA scientist who speculates that our universe is a computer simulation.

The article is somewhat thought-provoking, but the discussion at Metafilter is really entertaining.

In particular, I liked what one user (Malor) had to say:

I've been thinking for some time that all the quantum weirdness down at the bottom of things could be, in essence, lazy evaluation. Whatever computational substrate we're running on, to this way of thinking, simply never determines many of the answers, using approximations instead.

It's only when a specific answer actually matters that the computation is fully carried out

Schrodinger's Cat applies: how does the GodComputer decide what "matters"? But, you know, the "collapse of the wave function" was proven to arise *purely* as a result of the mathematics of the interaction between the cat and the environment by HS Green (nothing mystical or involving being observed by anthropocentric consciousness - newsflash, that's all rubbish folks!). So the GodComputer's wave-function-collapse algorithm doesn't have to decide, it's automated.

Interestingly, simply watching for 'hot spots' in the simulated universe, areas that are taking lots of computation time, should inevitably lead the implementors to interesting things happening in that universe.... our particle accelerators, if we're running on a simulation, would be producing some very, very strange requests for 'CPU time'. That would be a flashing neon light that the entities running the simulation should check out that third planet orbiting that unremarkable sun in that rather plebian spiral galaxy.

Nature routinely produces higher energies than the LHC in cosmic ray collisions. Those natural collisions are communicating with an environment and observables change, so wave functions are collapsing. The same amount of simulation would have to occur there as in the LHC, unless you subscribe to the idea that the rest of the universe if only an approximation until *someone* looks at it. Perhaps the Entities do have us fooled and the "paradoxes" of QM are really just blinds for shortcuts to approximations of reality where the simulation is just idling.

[. . .]

Another thought I just had: the fundamental quantum randomness might be very deliberate, a damping effect on perturbations. If the GodComputer has to go back to earlier frames and change the results of computations to match later measurements, the ripples from that change could potentially mean everything within that event's light cone would have to stop, return to an earlier frame, and restart -- a missed branch prediction, in CPU-speak. The random quantum oscillations could function as a field reducing the spread of butterfly-wing effects to a local area, so that scientists doing weird crap in a laboratory, instead of making a huge chunk of a galaxy miss a couple of beats, might just force a recomputation of their local laboratory... eventually, the ripples of difference would be swallowed by quantum noise.

It might well be possible to test mathematically if that would work or, if not, what changes to existing physics are needed to make it work. Theoretical and computational physicists please comment?

Metafilter recently had a thread discussing an interview (alas, poorly written) with Rich Terrile, a NASA scientist who speculates that our universe is a computer simulation.

The article is somewhat thought-provoking, but the discussion at Metafilter is really entertaining.

In particular, I liked what one user (Malor) had to say:

I've been thinking for some time that all the quantum weirdness down at the bottom of things could be, in essence, lazy evaluation. Whatever computational substrate we're running on, to this way of thinking, simply never determines many of the answers, using approximations instead. It's only when a specific answer actually matters that the computation is fully carried out, and, if necessary, any other retroactive adjustments to spacetime are also implemented. That's why quantum measurements taken in the future are always consistent with entangled ones taken in the past -- the simulation goes back, and edits everything that way. [. . .]

Interestingly, simply watching for 'hot spots' in the simulated universe, areas that are taking lots of computation time, should inevitably lead the implementors to interesting things happening in that universe.... our particle accelerators, if we're running on a simulation, would be producing some very, very strange requests for 'CPU time'. That would be a flashing neon light that the entities running the simulation should check out that third planet orbiting that unremarkable sun in that rather plebian spiral galaxy.

[. . .]

Another thought I just had: the fundamental quantum randomness might be very deliberate, a damping effect on perturbations. If the GodComputer has to go back to earlier frames and change the results of computations to match later measurements, the ripples from that change could potentially mean everything within that event's light cone would have to stop, return to an earlier frame, and restart -- a missed branch prediction, in CPU-speak. The random quantum oscillations could function as a field reducing the spread of butterfly-wing effects to a local area, so that scientists doing weird crap in a laboratory, instead of making a huge chunk of a galaxy miss a couple of beats, might just force a recomputation of their local laboratory... eventually, the ripples of difference would be swallowed by quantum noise.

Gotta love this stuff.

http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/24/the-foxconn-iphone-riot-was-just-one-of-hundreds-in-china-today While it might have been an intramural fight between the Foxconn employees in this case, this is the mere tip of a giant Chinese iceberg. Sure, Foxconn builds electronics as cheaply as it can for whomever wants to cut a deal with them... That's been part of the company's mission statement since it was founded, but should this stop people like Anthony Kosner at Forbes from approaching or musing on the idea that the heightened demand for a product like iPhone has just gotta be killing people in China for the sake of consumer contempt over issues like the phone being too lightweight. Ugh, the absurdity. I wonder if we can find out how many iPhone units have been returned because the customer 'didn't like it enough.'